Racial meanings and scientific methods: changing policies for NIH-sponsored publications reporting human variation

Conventional wisdom holds that race is socially constructed and not based on genetic differences. Cutting-edge genetic research threatens this view and hence also endangers the pursuit of racial equality and useful public health research. The most recent incarnation of racial genetics is not due to scientific discoveries about population differences per se, but follows from how the United States and other governments have organized racial categories. This article explains tensions in U.S. government guidelines and publications on the study of human genetic diversity, points out the absence of any compelling public health benefits that might justify this research, introduces conceptual tools for addressing the complicated heuristic and policy problems posed by medical population genetics, and offers two policy proposals to remedy the current problems.     

URBAN GOVERNMENT, URBAN POLITICS AND THE FABRICATION OF URBAN ISSUES: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF URBAN POLICY

An "urban" definition of public policy problems raises great difficulties for the policy maker. If we emphasize implementation as a primary factor in evaluating public policy, we have good grounds for questioning the wisdom of an urban perspective. But urban questions have been and still are major areas of concern in public policy formulation. The ALP federal platform contains a long section on urban policies, reiterating what the Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) was striving to achieve under the Whitlam Government. At state level, urban problems have been tackled with varying degrees of success and seriousness, although at this level overall urban perspectives tend to be ignored, for reasons we shall indicate. However urban planning authorities have been tried in most capital cities, and metropolitan plans have been drawn up for all of them. They have concentrated mainly on land use and urban form. By the 1970s a common criticism of such planning was that it left aside many social and economic aspects of urban growth. For example, one (admittedly partisan) government source—the N.S.W. Department of Decentralization and Development—noted "a massive and increasing trend towards socio-economic segregation":
…the remoteness of central city facilities …the cost of commuter transport and the inadequacy of community facilities in low-income outer suburbs are operating to perpetuate economic under-privilege.     

The use of children's religious ideas in their psychiatric evaluation

Children's religious ideas provide a source of projective material that can be relevant clinically in a child's psychiatric evaluation. Areas that are sometimes revealed include (1) information about the child's parental introjects; (2) level of superego formation; (3) level of defense formation; (4) areas that are most anxiety provoking for the child. This religious material is frequently ignored, but can be a particularly useful adjunct when the usual child-evaluative techniques do not reveal a complete picture.Her psychiatric training included an adult psychiatry residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston, and a child psychiatry residency at McLean Hospital, Belmont. Presently a candidate in the psychoanalytic institute, and in private practice.Her psychiatric training included an adult psychiatry residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston, and a child psychiatry residency at McLean Hospital, Belmont. She is also a candidate in the psychoanalytic institute and in private practice.     

Public Sector Reform, Intergovernmental Relations and the Future of Australian Federalism

Recent developments in the reform of intergovernmental relations have been influenced by contemporary models of public sector reform. Their systematic application to intergovernmental administration, in particular the manner in which jointly funded and managed programs are organised, may have profound and unanticipated effects on the federal system. When viewed in the context of a recent history of collaborative policymaking between political executives, the possibility that new forms of intergovernmental joint policy-making and program management might become the norm poses serious challenges to federal traditions of dual government. Arm's length and collaborative forms of joint decision making are contrasted as ideal types, and then used to analyse two case studies in collaborative intergovernmental decision-making — National Competition Policy and the National Training Agreement. It is concluded that the system-wide implications are profound if they are part of a broader trend, but caution is expressed about the powers of inertia and resistance in traditional forms of federal politics.     

Global and local models of governance in interaction: configurations of power in Upper Guinea Coast societies

ABSTRACT

This paper studies emerging power configurations in Upper Guinea Coast societies which result from contemporary interactions of global and local models of governance. With empirical data on shifting meanings of chieftaincy and control of land, changing tax regimes and the rising importance of youth in domestic politics, modifications of legitimate authority across time are contrasted with the effects of international interventions and global discourses on socio-political change. Some of these interventions accelerate, others accentuate or counteract processes of change within local power configurations. Only by carefully considering the innate malleability of local concepts of authority, history, and tradition can contemporary processes of change be identified as either mere reconfigurations or genuinely new configurations of power.     

Visualizing Lives: New Pathways for Analyzing Life Course Trajectories

The goal of statistical analysis is to find patterns in data. Most statistical methods rely on analyzing the effect of the same set of variables on the population under study, i.e., nomothetic analysis. Therefore, when data are collected in the social sciences, most often they are put in a framework that resembles a spreadsheet: each row represents a separate individual, and each column represents a separate characteristic (or variable) that pertains to that individual.However, not all individuals in the study are affected by the same set of variables: each individual may have his/her own individual set of relevant variables, suggesting that methods be developed that consider them individually, i.e., idiographic analysis. Moreover, lives are lived chronologically, and are often best described in narrative form. These narratives usually have to be condensed, or abridged in other ways, in order to fit the data framework and permit what one might call ``algorithmic analysis. Each set of methods has its advantage: nomothetic methods generate general laws that apply to all, while idiographic methods trace the putative causal relationships that are unique to each individual.This paper describes another data collection and analytic framework, one that (a) is chronological; (b) recognizes that different people may have experienced entirely different events and thus may need different ``variables to understand their behavior; (c) recognizes that, even if people experience similar events, they may have entirely different reactions to them; and (d) can be studied (and patterns inferred) using an exploratory graphical analysis that is more free-form than algorithmic analysis. Examples of this type of analysis used in different medical and criminal justice contexts are given, and suggested directions of research in this area are described.     

Bias and Overconfidence in Parametric Models of Interactive Processes*

We assess the ability of logit, probit and numerous other parametric models to test a hypothesis that two variables interact in influencing the probability that some event will occur [Pr(Y)] in what we believe is a very common situation: when one's theory is insufficiently strong to dictate a specific functional form for the data generating process. Using Monte Carlo analysis, we find that many models yield overconfident inferences by generating 95% confidence intervals for estimates of the strength of interaction that are far too narrow, but that some logit and probit models produce approximately accurate intervals. Yet all models we study generate point estimates for the strength of interaction with large enough average error to often distort substantive conclusions. We propose an approach to make the most effective use of logit and probit in the situation of specification uncertainty, but argue that nonparametric models may ultimately prove to be superior.     

The Council of Australian Governments and Intergovernmental Relations: A Case of Cooperative Federalism

A series of Special Premiers' Conferences begun in 1990, andthe establishment of the Council of Australian Governments in1992, signaled a phase of "cooperative federalism" in Australia.Joint schemes of policy and legislation and new national intergovernmentalbodies were made by a series of formal agreements. The conditionsand circumstances are appraised in a discussion of the natureof intergovernmental coordination and cooperation, and fromthe critical perspective of a model of competitive federalism.It is concluded that the initiatives, largely, did not representa centralizing process, nor did they override strongly articulatedclaims for diversity. This is made clear following an analysisof the processes occurring in the newly established federalinstitutions and from a series of brief case studies. They expressedthe continuing interdependency and underlying autonomy of stateand Commonwealth governments through schemes that promised tobring agreed, joint benefits through federal solutions.     

Intimate Partner Violence as a Risk Factor for Mental Disorders: A Meta-Analysis

This article reviews literature on the prevalence of mental health problems among women with a history of intimate partner violence. The weighted mean prevalence of mental health problems among battered women was 47.6% in 18 studies of depression, 17.9% in 13 studies of suicidality, 63.8% in 11 studies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 18.5% in 10 studies of alcohol abuse, and 8.9% in four studies of drug abuse. These were typically inconsistent across studies. Weighted mean odds ratios representing associations of these problems with violence ranged from 3.55 to 5.62, and were typically consistent across studies. Variability was accounted for by differences in sampling frames. Dose-response relationships of violence to depression and PTSD were observed. Although research has not addressed many criteria for causal inferences, the existing research is consistent with the hypothesis that intimate partner violence increases risk for mental health problems. The appropriate way to conceptualize these problems deserves careful attention.